No one who has seen Lucy Prebble's play about the collapse of Enron can forget the velociraptors. These menacing, red-eyed dinosaurs are used to represent the company's unique contribution to the financial hall of shame: accounting monsters created to gobble up debt and hide it from shareholders with a brazenness they could never imagine.

But the so-called "special purpose entities" (named Raptors 1 to 4 by Enron finance director Andrew Fastow) were perhaps not so unusual, after all. When the time comes to stage our most recent financial drama, theatre directors might want to take a closer look at the beasts that Lehman Brothers kept chained in the shadows.

A 2,200-page legal report into the bank's demise revealed last week a similar addiction to accounting hallucinogens. Until now, the big mystery was how the Wall Street giant could have been reporting healthy profits right up until the moment it keeled over and died – bringing most of the west's economies down with it. But the latest investigation reveals financial transactions known as Repo 105 and Repo 108, used to temporarily remove tens of billions of dollars of debt from the bank's balance sheet at the end of every accounting period.

Rather than Fastow, it is Lehman's telegenic young finance director and front woman Erin Callan who is likely to end up in the starring role in any theatrical battle of the Repos. Callan is already subject of a forthcoming book on Lehman called The Devil's Casino, by Vanity Fair journalist Vicky Ward, which also highlights the bizarre rituals forced upon wives of Lehman bankers.

The capacity for Lehman to continue to shock after a year of books and revelations is itself a shock. But the greatest surprise is how little has changed since Enron and the scams of the last financial bubble.

Regulators like to caution against simply addressing the specific causes of past scandals when trying to prevent future ones, but it is as if all the Wall Street rules introduced to clean up accounting have only encouraged finance directors to study the history books more closely for inspiration.

Perhaps when Prebble's play moves to Broadway next month, she can simply swap Lehman for Enron.